Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides [101]
Zoë looked down at him—about a foot. He asked her to dance. The next thing she knew, they had started off across the ballroom floor.
“Tessie told me a lot about you in her letters,” said Michael Antoniou.
“Nothing too bad, I hope.”
“Just the opposite. She told me what a good Christian you are.”
His long robe concealed his small feet, making it difficult for Zoë to follow. Nearby, Tessie was dancing with Milton in his white naval uniform. As the couples passed each other, Zoë glared comically at Tessie and mouthed the words, “I’m going to kill you.” But then Milton twirled Tessie around and the two rivals came face-to-face.
“Hey there, Mike,” said Milton cordially.
“It’s Father Mike now,” said the vanquished suitor.
“Got a promotion, eh? Congratulations. I guess I can trust you with my sister.”
He danced away with Tessie, who looked back in silent apology. Zoë, who knew how infuriating her brother could be, felt sorry for Father Mike. She suggested they get some wedding cake.
EX OVO OMNIA
So, to recap: Sourmelina Zizmo (nee Papadiamandopoulos) wasn’t only my first cousin twice removed. She was also my grandmother. My father was his own mother’s (and father’s) nephew. In addition to being my grandparents, Desdemona and Lefty were my great-aunt and -uncle. My parents would be my second cousins once removed and Chapter Eleven would be my third cousin as well as my brother. The Stephanides family tree, diagrammed in Dr. Luce’s “Autosomal Transmission of Recessive Traits,” goes into more detail than I think you would care to know about. I’ve concentrated only on the gene’s last few transmissions. And now we’re almost there. In honor of Miss Barrie, my eighth-grade Latin teacher, I’d like to call attention to the quotation above: ex ovo omnia. Getting to my feet (as we did whenever Miss Barrie entered the room), I hear her ask, “Infants? Can any of you translate this little snippet and give its provenance?”
I raise my hand.
“Calliope, our muse, will start us off.”
“It’s from Ovid. Metamorphoses. The story of creation.”
“Stunning. And can you render it into English for us?”
“Everything comes out of an egg.”
“Did you hear that, infants? This classroom, your bright faces, even dear old Cicero on my desk—they all came out of an egg!”
Among the arcana Dr. Philobosian imparted to the dinner table over the years (aside from the monstrous effects of maternal imagination) was the seventeenth-century theory of Preformation. The Preformationists, with their roller-coaster names—Spallazani, Swammerdam, Leeuwenhoek—believed that all of humankind had existed in miniature since Creation, in either the semen of Adam or the ovary of Eve, each person tucked inside the next like a Russian nesting doll. It all started when Jan Swammerdam used a scalpel to peel away the outer layers of a certain insect. What kind? Well … a member of the phylum Arthropoda. Latin name? Okay, then: Bombyx mori. The insect Swammerdam used in his experiments back in 1669 was nothing other than a silkworm. Before an audience of intellectuals, Swammerdam cut away the skin of the silkworm to reveal what appeared to be a tiny model of the future moth inside, from proboscis to antennae to folded wings. The theory of Preformation was born.
In the same way, I like to imagine my brother and me, floating together since the world’s beginning on our raft of eggs. Each inside a transparent membrane, each slotted for his or her (in my case both) hour of birth. There’s Chapter Eleven, always so pasty, and bald by the age of twenty-three, so that he makes a perfect homunculus. His pronounced cranium indicates his future deftness with mathematics and mechanical things. His unhealthy pallor suggests his coming Crohn’s disease. Right next to him, there’s me, his sometime sister, my face already a conundrum, flashing like a lenticular decal between two images: the